Bridge to Sovietopia

  • Marie Alice Wolfszahn
  • Austria, Germany, Ukraine
  • 2020
  • 16 min
  • Linear
  • World Premiere
  • do not touch, IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling

Like an invisible spirit, the user of this VR is guided through the architectural remains of a lost utopia. In three chapters, entitled Progress, Productivity, and Ideology, rusty monuments to the scientific, industrial, and cultural achievements of the Soviet Union glide by. A memento mori for every worldly power.

The Institute of Ionosphere owned the largest parabolic antenna in the Soviet Union and was able to generate bursts of electricity more powerful than natural lightning. The colossal factories of Kryvyi Rih, which are still in use, were at the heart of the national steel industry. And the stars of the USSR once glittered at the now derelict and abandoned Ilyich Palace of Culture.

The user floats serenely through the flaking structures of the former Soviet state of Ukraine, which are still impressive in their size and ambition. Meanwhile, the audio design combines an electronic soundscape with fragments of voices and singing, echoes of a bygone dream of the future.

 


Credits

  • 16 min
  • Spoken languages: English, Russian
  • Subtitles in: English
Director
Marie Alice Wolfszahn
Production
Kurt Mayer for Kurt Mayer Film
Key collaborator
Tobias Götz
Cinematography
Gabriel Krajanek, Tobias Götz
Editing
Marie Alice Wolfszahn

IDFA history

2020
World Premiere
do not touch
IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling

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IDFA history

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